Creepy - Return to Return to Oz

Episode Date: September 10, 2018

Art mirrors life...life mirrors art...***Credited to Justin.Parallax***Please consider supporting the podcast at Patreon.com/Creepypod or creepypod.com/support***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3SrH_3fsROXFAjomKcUtw***Produced by Steve Blizin, Puzzle Audio***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Creepies made possible thanks to our patrons. Patrons like Marvin Bradley, Taylor J, Alex Ryder, Kristen Lowry, Jennifer Gatlin, Sam Rodriguez, Andrew Fricks, Robert Barris, Dan Harmon, Ryan Ziesel, James Cleary, and Mail Lady. All patrons get early commercial-free access to episodes, and depending on your reward tier, it only goes up from there, including sticker sets, bonus episodes and personalized narrations. If you'd like to find out more about how you can support the podcast, please check out the reward cheers at patreon.com slash creepypod.

This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fascinating. Applications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy Presents

Return to Return to Oz. Written by Justin Parallax at creepypasta.org, Kansas. In 1985, the Disney film Return to Oz was released. Easton Cinemas and a few years later made its way onto Home VHS. I can't remember how old I was the time I seen it, perhaps five years old at most. I knew right away that there was something unusual about the film, something especially disturbing.

I remember that the first time I seen it, I cried. I remember watching the film, glued in place in front of television, not out of involvement, but out of terror. Truth be told, that's a bloody scary film. Now before you're grown and go to read something else, don't worry. This isn't the story of a haunted videotape.

The film itself played out perfectly normal as much as possible. Dorothy didn't turn to the camera and start screaming while blood poured from her eyes or anything stupid like that. I'm not interested in telling you stupid stories like you've read a hundred times before. I just want to tell you how I felt when I watched this video. Some of the strange things that are reminded me about. It's a strange story, and I really wonder quite what the producer. Paul Mislanski was thinking at the time.

I know that the power behind the film didn't really rest with him. instead it rested with the film's director, Walter Merch, the specialist in sound and editing. Merch worked on editing for films like The Godfather and Apocalypse now, but returned to Oz was his only venture into directing. I keep thinking that something may have happened to him during production of this film, maybe something that put him off directing any films from then onwards, but that's just a guess. My mother got a copy of the film on VHS.

I remember distinctly because she also had a copy of the old Judy Garland musical version. She loved that film. I was someone less impressed with it. The Sepia opening. Her child that was used to color television seemed boring to me. I didn't care for the dancing and the witch didn't impress me. All the sets looked just too false. I found myself not appreciating the film.

My mother, though, loved it. When I was an adult, she told me about Judy Garland's drug addiction and her gradual fall from Hollywood Grace, a story that felt equally tragic to anything on the silver screen. Return to Oz, however, wasn't a sequel. In fact, the only thing that connected it to the musical version was the presence of ruby slippers, which were silver in the original book.

but my mother was still excited to see it, so she had asked a friend to find her a copy of the film, and we had watched it. The film tells the story of Dorothy's return to the wonderful land of Oz, or at least, should be wonderful, but it really isn't. But she's desperate to go back, and when we first meet her in the film, she's very depressed, miserable, lonely. The first image we have in the film is her staring sadly into a dirty mirror, and before long her family takes her to a hospital.

At the hospital, which it transpires as more of an asylum, Dorothy is introduced to a doctor, keen to try out the newly invented electric healing machine. The doctor introduces Dorothy to it, pointing out the machine's features. Here, he explains, pointing to the voltage meter, is its mouth, and here, he explains pointing to the switch that will send crackling shots of electricity searing through the young girl's skull, is his nose. She's escorted down into the bowels of the hospital, through tall and towering hallways, and locked within a barren empty cell. That night she is strapped to a hospital bed in Whilst the screams of other inmates echo through the hospital It secured the electric machine A storm rages outside

And soon it knocks out the hospital's power During which Dorothy is rescued by another young girl Together they flee into the river at the banks of the hospital Where they They drown I mean, Dorothy returns to the land of Oz. She journeys there in the ruins of an old crate floating down the river. That's the way the story goes.

But that's not all that happens. In the old Wizard of Oz film, along with Judy Garland, Dorothy's house is plucked out of the farm by a hurricane. We all know that hurricanes don't move people from one location and drop them gently and carefully. down in another. If she had been a real person, caught in a small wooden farmhouse in the winds of a hurricane,

Dorothy would have died. And maybe she did. And all the rest of the film was simply a hallucination within her fevered and frantic brain. That's just a theory. In this film, in return to Oz, Dorothy falls into the churning waters of the river, struggling to stay above its surface.

Her arms splashing, her mouth gasping for air. And then? Then she's in Oz. And for a few moments everything seems fine. Everything seems quite happy. She finds a talking chicken called Bolina, who offers to travel with her on a way to the Emerald City. Along the way, she finds a tree which distributes,

be some lunch boxes filled with ready-made sandwiches. It's almost like everything may turn out all right once they get to the Emerald City because then she'll be able to get back to her farm. Her farm. Where she sat staring into the dirty mirror, her eyes heavy with despair. David Kerr of the Chicago reader described this film as bleak, creepy, and occasionally terrifying. You don't want Dorothy to go home, not to the world full of doctors who want to rip the happiness from her, from the nurse who would tie her down, from the towering hallways and electric machines with wide grinning mounts, down the river.

So, Dorothy finds her old farmhouse, the one which she crashed in her previous visit to Oz. It sits in an overgrown forest. No, cheery dancing munchkins to be found here, only wild vines and twisted trees. Dorothy wipes the dust that has etched its way over the windows, trying to see inside. Then she finds the yellow brick road, only to realize it has been uprooted. Its bricks broken and shattered. The land she wanted to get back to was twisted, nightmarish, hostile. the old farmhouse

I grew up in a small village in the rural areas of Cornwall we had farms around the landscape and I could climb up one of the small gently sloping hills and look out into the horizon and see only fields of wheat for as far as it went that was my Kansas I think it was late summer when I found the old farmhouse

I'd gone out to explore despite my father's instructions stay in our house's garden. I'd hike my way over the old crumbling stone wall that bordered our garden. It made my way into the fields, venturing as far as I could before the sun would set. I avoided the fields with the cows, great towering things, and the clouds above will gradually begin to grow dark and pendulous. I'd gone farther than I had before, keen to examine to small copse of trees in the distance that I'd never seen to before. It was there, down near the foot of the hill, that I'd seen the old farmhouse for the first

time. I'd hurry down to the house and ran up to the windows. They were etched with dirt. I could barely see anything through them. I stood up on my tiptoes, trying to look into them. It could only make out a brownish haze. I scrubbed the windows, and soon I was able to make out the inside of the house. It was in disarray.

Chairs tipped over on a table lying broken in the corner. I could make out a doorway leading into another room, but whatever lay through there was out of sight. It wasn't the same house. The layout was different, and the ruins inside it were different. But in and of itself, the house was almost a perfect fit. It was like my own version of Dorothy's ruined farmhouse. Transported here not far from my home. I wanted to get inside.

I don't know why. Perhaps simply because it was there. Or perhaps because I wanted to get further than Dorothy ever did in the film. I pried the window open and... Under the house, the witch lies dead. crawled inside. It felt warm, as if the air itself was hot. There was a soft hum in the air, which I soon realized were coming from a few buzzing insects.

It felt stuffy, as if the summer heat was magnified and made heavy. There were no lights, or if there were, the lights would not come on. The room was dyed a soft reddish-brown from the dust on the windows, I crept across the... The house stands atop the dead witch as she wroughts beneath. Wooden floorboards. And sure enough, they creaked beneath me. I looked into the doorway to the other room and found it led into a kitchen.

Several items lay in the sink. Cutlery and sharp edges. I started to feel sick and want to be here. The air tasted wrong. tasted wrong. There was a smell, something I'd never smelled before, but I knew it was bad. I turned to leave and wanted to run, but I heard a heavy sound at the doorway and knew it was a footstep. The figure stood in the doorway, a man. The house is marked with death. It's sours it from below. The witch was left her body broken. Stood blocking out the sunlight.

He wore a thick, heavy brown coat, the kind most farmers in the area would wear, but his beard was thick and mottled like wire wool. His hair hung in dense clumps and he stared at me with his eyes, sharp and brutal eyes with utterly intense hatred. He towered above me, a small child of about six years, this giant of a figure. He was holding something in his right hand. I couldn't see what, only that it was sharp and pointed and stained with mud. I had to be mud. The man opened his mouth and roared at me. His teeth crooked behind his mane-like beard, releasing every echo at the broken house with his words. Get out! and ran out of the house, charging through the kitchen and pulling myself through the window and out into the field.

I didn't slow down for a second. I tripped and fell into the mud at the base of the window, but I didn't stop. Kept running. I didn't look back. I ran over the field and through the trees. I was gasping for air and my legs hurt, but I didn't stop running. Not until I got home. I didn't notice it was dark and that the sun had sat.

that the darker night had covered the village. I slammed the door shut, blocking out the man and the broken farmhouse forever. My father came downstairs when he heard me slam the door and demanded to know where I had been and what I'd been doing. I didn't want to explain. I didn't want to tell him. And so I lied. He demanded to know more ardently, telling me that it was late that he knew I was lying. When I eventually did tell him, he marched me up to my bedroom and ordered me to lower my pants and lay over my bed, where he removed his bell and thrashed my butt until I was screaming and crying rampantly.

He made me promise, unthreatted the same punishment being delivered again, that I would not sneak into people's houses again. I was still sore for most of the next day. I had no idea until years later as to why he had grown so angry with me. When I did find out, it was in my teenage years. Our family had moved away from the village, into a small house in a large city. The change had been considerable, not just in terms of the building, but of the new lifestyle. It became impossible to avoid hearing about the world around us,

and I no longer had my parents' continual presence to shelter me. from the information that you could find on the newspapers or the internet. It was on the evening news that I'd seen the photograph of the man in the old farmhouse. The reporter explained that he had died in prison, serving his life's sentence for the murder of four young children, all aged between four and nine years old. You've been arrested a month after my dad had taken his belt to me and made me promise not to venture into stranger's houses again. In prison, he had committed suicide.

The news didn't say how. I later learned he'd broken off a sharp edge of his toothbrush and swallowed it, slicing open his throat. He choked a death on his own blood. Dorothy continued her journey down the broken ruins of Yellowbrick Road. So did I. The gale. When Dorothy arrived at her journey.

at the Emerald City, she finds all her friends. They've been turned to stone. They stand around the ruins at the Emerald City. Their body is lifeless. The city's abandoned, with only their bodies left gray and stoic. The Emerald City is a mausoleum. But it's not unoccupied. In one of the most terrifying moments of the film we meet the living occupants at the city. It tumbles into view, moving on four legs, each like ending in a screeching rusty wheel. At first we see its face as a black twisted mass of tissue and muscle, corrupted into a maniacal grimace, eyes peering out with a cold, biting glare. Then it lifts its head up, revealing that the previous face was simply a false one.

Its true face hidden beneath. It laughs. Come here! It rasps in a guttural scream. It laughs and laughs. More of them appear. Three, four, a whole gang. Dorothy flees and I would clutch my hands to my eyes, hoping to block them out

and just make the nightmarish creatures go away. Dorothy finds, locked in an old chamber in the Emerald City, a mechanical guardian called TikTok. He offers to protect her from the wheeled monsters. This creature has its own mechanical face, much like the one on the electric shock machine back in the hospital in Kansas. But it is Dorothy's friend, and it bites off the wheelers and discovers that the city has been taken over

by an evil witch called Mombie. TikTok isn't terrifying. He's a friendly, amicable character. The same cannot be said for all of Dorothy's friends. But we'll get to that. First we need to talk about Mombie. I didn't recognize her as a child when I first watched the film, but Mombie was played by Jean Marsh,

who also played the nurse that strapped Dorothy into her hospital bed at the start of the film, and who chased Dorothy into the river to meet her fate. She was, for five years, married to John. Unpertley, the actor who famously portrayed the third incarnation of Doctor Who. And perhaps more relevant to this story, he played the character of Orzel Gummage, a scarecrow who was brought to life. I mentioned the scarecrow, because Dorothy's other companion is a prisoner of Mombie's.

When Mombie traps Dorothy in her tower, the young girl from Kansas meets one of Mombie's failed experiments, Jack Pumpkinhead. Jack is a terrifying creature, taller than any adult actor in this film, with stick-thin limbs which seem to go on forever. He stands on steadily on elongated legs, wearing a tattered old discolored coat, its fingers end in long, reaching branches. Atop its neck sets a pumpkin in the place of a head. When a creature moves, it does so going sharp and sudden jerks, pulling its hands along as if they were alien parts of its body. Its voice is sickly sweet, provided by Brian Henson. Brian Henson is a son of the famous Jim Henson and is now chairman of the Jim Henson Company.

His voice is certainly the softest part of an otherwise terrifying creature. If you've ever seen the nightmare before Christmas, you may find some very interesting, interesting similarities with the film's lead character. And at several points throughout the film, Jack's limbs will break and fall apart, having to be boned back in place with rope. Dorothy's only way to escape from Mambi's tower is to steal the powder of life, which the witch used to bring the pumpkin-headed creature to life.

She stores the powder in a glass cabinet, along with her spare heads. Yes, Mambi has a... collection of heads. She changes them to fit her mood. They sit in the cabinets, looking for all purpose to be asleep, but each head is very much alive. That night when Dorothy attempts to steal the powder of life from the cabinet, she accidentally awakens one of the disembodied heads. Its eyes snap awake, and in a raspy voice it screams the girl's name. Dorothy Gaya! The their heads awake and start to scream. They scream and screamed, screamed. Their echoing cries woke the witch herself, who rose from her bad nightgown flowing like a specter. The space on her shoulders

where her head should be utterly vacant. A headless figure stumbling towards the young girl, arms outstretched. All the while her head screaming in terrible unison. We'd been in the city for a year. I'd been enrolled in a new school. It was far larger than I was accustomed to, and some of the boys at the start of the year had been brutally mocking. I was labeled as a farm boy and treated as an outsider. Over the course of the months, though, they had forgotten about my difference, and soon I was simply one of the other school kids. I'd seen him in the schoolyard. I didn't know his name, but he was a bright kid with a splash of sunlight blonde hair. I think he must have been about 11 years old, but to my eyes he could have been older by an infinite number of years.

He was a big kid. As a big kid, I tried to avoid him because he and his friends were loud and boisterous. He was in the upper years of school, and as a result, he didn't have to wear his uniform. None of the upper years did. And so the big kid would wear whatever he wanted, usually a white t-shirt and jeans. I don't think he'd ever spoken to me. I barely even noticed him. But because of what happened,

I remembered him. It was summer. I was off school during the start of summer holidays. It couldn't have been more than weeks since school had stopped, and it was still a few more weeks before we were due to head away to the seaside to spend our holidays. holiday in the sun. It was already a nice enough day.

The sun was warm. It was a cool wind. Dorothy Gale. In the air. My mother had taken me to the city center earlier that day. She wanted to pick up a few items from the large post office where packages were sorted. I was feeling rather sour. As my mother's venture out to do the daily shopping, it interrupted my time for watching

morning cartoons. Nevertheless, I had trudged along on the promise that if I behaved I could rent a film out from the video rental store that evening. It had been a long time since we'd rent it out returned to Oz. The film had faded from my memory. I was excited. I was keen to see what we could find in the dark little video rental store. My mother was already certain she wanted to rent out the Judy Garland musical book.

version of the Wizard of Oz to relive her love of the classic. This was years before blockbusters came here. In video rental stores were still small little stores owned by enterprising individuals looking to break into a new market. My mother parked the car just a few yards from the store and we got out. The wind, Dorothy Gale, was starting to pick up. And it started to feel a little cold. I grabbed my coat from the back seat of the car and pulled it on.

My mother looked over to me and said, I'm going to pop into the bakery for a moment. The bakery I should mention was on the street corner, two stores from the video rental shop with the small barber shop between the two. Wait here. She indicated to the front of the video store. I waited. I wasn't going to argue.

I certainly wasn't going to disobey. The prom was watching a new film that evening was enough to ensure that. I waited for what felt like an age, but I'm sure no more than a minute. When I heard the shouts from the other side of the street, I looked over. It was the big kid. He had his white t-shirt and jeans. His bright blonde hair shining especially bright in the summer sun. He was on a bicycle, along with three other friends.

I recognized all them from school. But just like the big kid, I didn't know their names. They were shouting at each other, circling around on their bikes, doing small tricks. One of the big kid's friends would make his bike hop back and forth. In other words, swerve his front wheels, standing up tall on the pedals. The road was quiet. After about a minute, the group moved into the road, riding around the parked cars. It was a peaceful morning.

About 11 o'clock, the boys were cheering. One of them made his bike hop up onto the pavement, spinning the handlebars around as he did so. Not a single other sound broke the summer day. I watched the big kid and his friends do their tricks for a moment and turned to look at the window at the video rental store. The window's full of posters, and I was curious to see what films they were advertising. I looked from one to another, barely noticing when the sunlight dimmed somewhat as a cloud passed in front of the sun. The next light brush of wind, Dorothy Gale, felt a bit colder, so I rent my arms around

myself and waited for me nothing. I heard one of the big kids' friends cry out. Truck must have taken a turn on the road too fast. I didn't see a turn, but when I heard the cry, I turned to look and see it. seen it tearing down the road. It was a huge truck, massive, tower, and ferocious. Its carriage smashed into one of the cars on the far side of the road. The boys in the streets started to turn and run, panic in their steps.

One dropped his bike and ran on his feet instead. The scream of the truck's brakes suffocating his own scream. The big kid didn't move. I don't know why he didn't move at the time. I realize now that he was rooted to his spot by fear. His shirt whistled around him as he stared at the truck. Eyes wide. Mouth open.

A scream echoing from his mouth. I tried to raise his hands to cover his face, as if his thin arms would defend him from the monolithic ten-wheeled truck that was charging out of control towards him. He was screaming. screaming the screaming the truck bore down the street

and even though it was almost 30 foot from where I was standing I felt the air hit me in a hard gust North Eagle as it charged down on the big kid the truck didn't even collide with him simply poured over where he stood his body buckling beneath it folding like it was made of paper

His head at the height of the top of the wheels was tore free. There wasn't much blood. But the force of the truck colliding with the big kid ripped the boy's head from his shoulders and sent it hurdling across the road. The big kid's head struck the road. And suddenly it was nothing more than a hunk of meat. Like a prop in a movie. I wasn't screaming.

I couldn't. My throat simply wouldn't make any sound. except for a series of wheezing gasps as I tried to pull enough air into my lungs. I couldn't scream because I couldn't breathe. But they were screaming in the air, North Gale, and I couldn't figure out who was screaming.

Then I realized it was the head. The big kid's head, swaying lately as it lay on the side of the road in the gutter, emptying his last sounds from the ruin of his throat, an awful scream that rattled from the severed neck, just for a few short seconds. The truck had stopped where it was, its brakes bringing to a stop all too late. But beneath its wheels, the big kid's body twitched for a few moments more.

His arms playing out the last moments of his muscle memory as he tried to feel around in the empty air above his shoulders. The witch kept a collection of heads. She changed them and were a different one depending on her mood. And after a few short, terrible seconds, the movement ceased. The screaming stopped. The big kid, who had less than a minute before been a living person, was rendered into pieces of unmoving matter.

Human meat, broken apart and empty. My mother ran from the bakery over to me and pulled me out of the way, hoping to move me out of the scene would push what I'd seen from my mind, but it didn't work. I closed my eyes, but the image didn't go away. I could still see the big kid's head. The side of his face ripped and caved inwards like a dessert bowl. His eyes in the wrong place and his mouth open as he let fall the last echoes of his scream. Dorothy, of course, had fled from the witches twitching,

her collection of screeching heads. She ran away and escaped the horror. I wasn't quite so lucky. Some things I couldn't escape from. They would hold me in place and exist in the space between the blinking of my eyes. Poison. With the powder of life, Dorothy was able to throw together a mass of assorted items in the Witch's Tower, a sofa and a moose's head, another random junk and brought it to life, creating an assorted mishmash of a creature. And like Jack Pumpkinhead was a jumbled amunculus of items. Dorothy flew away on the winged gump, flying across the deadly desert. The deadly desert.

A massive sand at the border of Oz, which, if you so much as touch the sand, will cause you to turn into sand yourself. Several of the wheelers pursued Dorothy, and when their wheels touch the sand, they collapsed. Their bodies yellowed, cracked, and fell apart. Their bodies sifting in the wind. The lines and curves of their faces shattering and breaking apart. The gump rips apart in the air. Its wings breaking and Dorothy and her friends crash land onto the mountain of the Gnome King. The sinister creature formed a living rock.

The Gnome King was played with austere and stern decorum by Nicole Williamson, a Scottish actor who forged his way through many respected Shakespeare roles on stage and screen before his death in 2011. Williamson also played the doctor from the hospital back in Kansas. That both the sinister doctor and his beastly assistant had been incarnated in Oz, actors and all, makes me all the more sure that the dark and sinister ayes of this film is but a flash and Dorothy's memory as she drowns in the river during that storm. No. She doesn't drown.

No matter how many times I try to remind myself with the story, I keep thinking that she drowned. I've seen the film many times as an adult, and yet each time I watch I find myself thinking as she falls into the churning waters of the river, it's here at this point that she drowns. I know in my conscious mind that she doesn't, but each time I think back on this film, I remember Dorothy slipping beneath the thrashing waves, her skin wet and cold, gasping for air,

drowning beneath the weight of the water. No, Dorothy does not drown. That's not the story in this film. I keep remembering the film differently. I keep thinking that she drowns, but she doesn't. She doesn't drown. Dorothy does not drown. She goes to Oz and rescues her friends,

who been captured by the Gnome King. She goes into the Gnome King's treasure chamber where he's turned all her friends into ornaments, and she brings him back to life. She, Little for Roosevelt, in her first film role, She didn't drown. She went on to be Stacy and American History X. She didn't drown.

She brings them all back to the Emerald City. And the Gnom king, Gnome King dies. The evil witch Mambi. She's captured by the heroes. But the Gnome King dies. Dorothy's companion. The talking chicken called Bolina drops an egg into the Gnome King's mouth. The Gnome King at this point in the film,

having become a gigantic creation of living rock, gags and chokes. He rasps the words, eggs, poison, and crumbles. His entire body breaks apart slowly, chunks of rock falling away, taking his face with it, eggs, poison. Eggs, of course, are not poison. In the film, they're only poisonous to the gnome king.

I never did understand why, and when I was a child I didn't even realize that it was a condition purely to the Gnome King, not something that would affect any of the other characters, human or otherwise. The statement was simply a proclamation. A warning. Eggs. Poison. Whilst his face turned to rock, churned, boiled, and fell apart like pebbles. Poison.

My mother served me a plate of scramble. legs for lunch. This is two weeks before we moved to the city, away from our village home. We'd lived in a small village for my entire life. We'd know more than 30 buildings in a single main street with its local shop, pub, schoolhouse, and church. Surrounded as we were by farmland, a large number of our local produce was agriculture, local beef, pork, and eggs. And push the plate away.

Not hungry? Asked my mother. I shook my head. Poisoned. I found the nest during summer. It was hidden in the roots of an old oak tree near the back of the church hall. It had been built by some of the stray chickens

who had nestled down amongst and harled and twisted old roots of the rotting tree. I found it one morning. It was on my way to school. It had been raining the night before on my rubber Wellington boots were flecked with mud. There was a sound I first heard. Bleeding cry.

I stepped through the soggy grass and leaned closer, peering through the shadows of the old tree ruts. The nest was wet and full of dirt. Two chicken eggs sat in the dirt. Their surface is glistling from the rain. The third egg lay in pieces. Bits of its shell hung like a deflated balloon. The infant chicken had been born too early.

It was premature and half formed. Its body looked like a wet mess of string. His body was oily and black. It seemed to be made in muscle fiber. Its head was too big for its neck and hung limply to one side. Its eyes opened far too wide. It was twitching as if on a string, trying to breathe, struggling to live. The rest of it was only partly there.

There was a premature birth. A fetus of a creature more muscle and tissue than life. Its egg had cracked and spilled the chicken into the world, rejecting it. Poisoned. We didn't have a cafeteria at school. It was too small a building. Instead, the local store would send a van to the back of the schoolhouse where the teachers would collect our meals and bring them into the gym hall,

which also doubled as the auditorium. despite it being significantly too small to qualify as one. We sat and ate our lunches. Those who got our lunches from school van and those who brought a pack lunch together. My mother had made me some ham sandwiches with a crust cut neatly off. I sat with three other kids from my class. Chris was a keen football fan, and would usually rush through his lunch in order to finish early so he could hurry into the yard

and kick a ball around for a while. Josh was a quiet bookish sort who had long black hair and a set of strong braces which shone each time he smiled there was Gary who didn't speak much but followed the rest of us around

quite eagerly I chewed on my sandwich for a while not really speaking Chris was talking eagerly about the football match you watch on television last night I didn't really care about football and his description of kicks and goals seemed almost like an alien language

to me. He took a bite of a sandwich, continued to talk, spring bits of food as he did so. I turned to Josh wanting to tell him about the nest that I'd found. I told him about the chick, land squirming in the muddy ground, gasping for life. Josh shook his head. All chickens are little when they're born, he said. I tried to explain that it wasn't simply a baby chick, that it was half formed and dying. but I was only a child and wouldn't form the description properly. At best I could explain they'd have been born wrong. Chris took another bite out of his sandwich and made a soft coughing sound.

Josh said maybe a fox found the nest and was eaten some of the eggs, and that maybe it had left a dead chick behind. I tried to explain that this might be possible and Chris coughed again. I turned to look at him. His face looked wrong. brighter and puffier. Coughed again and again louder. He began to motion towards his throat.

A few other kids from nearby turned and noticed as Chris's coughing became more insistent. He dropped his sandwich. One of you gotten from the lunch van. It fell open, the slices of bread separating to show the creamy and white shade of its content. Egg mayonnaise. Chris tried to see.

I stand up, but couldn't, tripping as he did so. Josh run forward trying to slap him on the back. Help! He shouted. Chris was clasping into his throat now, his face flushing from a pale red to a deeper, more blood-like shade. He was grown frantic. He began to panic.

He was wheezing for air, the breathed trying desperately to fill his lungs, but he couldn't. And without any air, he would drown. Choked to death. But that wasn't right. That wasn't what was killing him. I knew what was killing him. It was a poison. The eggs and the sandwich.

The teacher was running over, but Chris had fallen to the floor at this point. His rasping gasps for air fell in the small hall. He twitched, thrashing for air, his skin turning a darker shade of red, and I thought about the chick, which was doing the very same. I grabbed the teacher's arm. It's the eggs. I said insistently my eyes stinging as I felt tears in them. The eggs. They're poisoned.

Chris was taken to the local doctor's clinic where they found the obstruction in his throat. A large piece of eggshell, almost the size of a small coin, which had burrowed its sharp edge in the side of his throat. I still don't think the film is cursed. The whole cursed movie thing doesn't work, not in reality. It may have been the director's only movie, but that doesn't mean anything about it was unusual. I don't think the video I watched was haunted. No.

This definitely wasn't a movie that was haunted. It was me. By the time she goes back to Kansas to Dorothy's journey's over, she's fell in the rightful heir to the throne of Oz and helped her reclaim the world. We learned that the hospital burned to the ground during the storm, The doctor died in the fire, burned to death. Nome King died, so did the doctor. Both characters, both played by the same actor, met the same fate.

But Dorothy was home, and she was wiser and more confident now. Her sadness was gone. She could carry the memory of Oz with her forever. I wonder if that was her curse as well. That poor little Dorothy Cale would forever return to Oz. Goodbye, yellow brick row. I stood on the road where the truck had struck and killed the blonde hair kid. This was about a month ago.

I was in the city for business. I just finished a new project, the shooting of a new film. When I was 12, I watched a movie called Cinema Paradiso, a classic of modern Italian movies. It follows the story of a man who grows up in a small village and to who the local cinema has a major impact on his life. He goes on to grow up to become a respected film director. There are similarities between our lives. When I had finished my fifth feature film,

I began to wonder what kind of influence the films I had watched as a child had on me, how they had shaped me into who I was. The character in Cinema Paradiso was bolstered by these. They give him strength and means of escape. For me, there was one film that terrified me. And that's what brought me back to the streets where the big kid had died in the truck accident. It was only coincidence that had brought me here. I had two weeks to go until editing would begin on the film and I needed a break, a way to clear my head.

The editing was due to take place in our main studio, but by sheer coincidence, my hotel wasn't too far from where the truck accident had occurred. That evening I walked the street. I thought it would maybe look the same. I didn't really know what I hoped I'd find. I didn't want to draw out my memories. Maybe I just wanted to see them one last time. I ordered to say goodbye. The video rental store was long since gone.

Bakery was still there, though. The young man behind the counter told me that he couldn't remember a video rental store being there on the street ever since he'd moved to the city some seven years ago. Time had changed. I'd expected to see the marks. of the tires from the truck on the road. I didn't.

No black scorch of burned rubber. No dash of blood in the gutter where the head had landed. The city had changed. It had moved on. Only my memory remained. There was one last place I had to go. My home village and Cornwall had changed perhaps more drastically. I drove there in my white sedan.

And when I pulled up in the village's main street, I realized the time had ravaged. the place far worse than any hurricane could. I was determined not to let the way to time dissuade me from what I intended to do, though. I parked my car and looked around. I tasted the air and looked around. I drove through the smooth hills, which were once full of wheat, but were now empty. My Kansas was gone.

The air tasted different. This, I thought, was my own return to odds. The post office was shut. It had closed many years before. A small corner shop was now a safe way. Even so was the small one who told me a single checkout. I went into the local pub, which I'd never done when I was a child here. The man behind the bar barely took notice of me.

All around me, people seemed to hold, as if history had chewed on them and left their wrinkled faces nod. I didn't see any chisel. children here. The bartender told me there weren't really any young families around here anymore. No work around here, it seemed. Only the old people who had once worked the farms, waiting for the dust of the earth to reclaim them. Being in the village was painful.

I felt like a relic, something that the past had forgotten. Time had moved on. I had moved on. The village had not. It had struggled. They'd have lost. I didn't want to stay for too long.

I knew I wanted to make this quick before being here became too painful. Before the ghosts of my memories began to hurt me. I left the pub and started on my walk. The school was the closest, so I went there first. It was a poor decision. The building itself was barren. The sign at the front, with the school's name that had once been boldly etched on it, have been taken down.

The building was abandoned. Without children to teach, there was no use of a school anymore. I learned from the manual in the local pub that the hall, where Chris had choked on the broken piece of egg shell so many years before, was still occasionally used for village meetings. But the classrooms have long since been abandoned. I walked around the building, peering into the rooms. They were all barren, empty to furniture.

No desk. no chairs. One held an old blackboard and surface covered in dust. When I got to the church, I realized before I even stepped into the yard that the old oak tree was long gone. I found an old priest with a shock of dirty white hair tending the front of the church. When I asked him about the tree, he told me that it had caught a disease several years before and was cut down. I walked into the yard, and sure enough, found the dry old patch of ground where the tree once stood. Ground felt harder than the soil surrounding it, and rose in a steady lump, like a despoiled grave. The old farmhouse had been demolished. It had been concreted over as if to prevent anyone else from building there.

At the foot of the hill, a large square patch of gray concrete was almost lost amongst tall grass. I almost stumbled across it because the years had pushed the details of the location from my mind. when I found the patch of concrete I half expected to find a small plaque as well perhaps a dedication to the four children who've been murdered and buried there there wasn't one the concrete itself was cracked and old by then

with bits of weeds and long grass peaking its way through like nature's own fingertips it was almost I thought like the world wants to forget and felt tired the journey had been painful bittersweet. I felt that I had made my homecoming

and felt the sadness that it would bring. I wanted to leave. Soon. The memories were too strong. Ones it were so powerful for me, but that the rest of the world had done its best to forget. I had made my journey. So I thought.

But I wasn't yet done. The sun was starting to set by the time I reached the river. I don't know what brought me there. I had no idea what guided my steps. I'd forgotten that the village had a river. In the daylight, I thought the river might look beautiful. But with the sun starting to dye the sky red and slipped down towards the horizon, made the undercurrents of the water look dark.

My feet had brought me here, almost unbidden, as if I were following a trail that was laid out for me a long time ago. This is where my broken, ruined, yellow brick road leads me. And that's when I remembered. This is where she drowned. I didn't remember it all at once. The images came first. Her face with her eyes widened hair.

The water splashing over her skin and making it glisten. Her mouthful and unable to take in enough air. Her short black hair slick against her scalp and in utter disarray. The water kept water. washing over her face, the dark cloak of the current covering her for a few fleeting moments before she broke the surface again, only did it back into its icy embrace again. I was on the bank of the river. I was clasping onto her arm, but it was cold on a winter's night, and her arm was too wet, and I was wearing gloves, and she kept slipping. I couldn't hold on.

I couldn't get a good grip. I wasn't strong enough. I was only six years old and she was four and the river had her. The river held her in its grip and the water was like fingers and it had a better grip on her than I ever could. She was crying, shouting for me to help. The water was weighing her down and stopping her words from escaping. She was drowning and I was panicking. I was meant to look after her. She was my sister and I was her big brother and I was meant to protect her.

I was meant to look after her, and she was drowning. She had fallen in and hit the water with a splash. That splash was so loud that it had broken the world, and I'd forgotten, maybe not forgotten. I think my mind had forced the memory out. I knew I couldn't cope with it, not when I was just a little boy. I remember my parents in their tears and the ambulance that was called, and my parents telling me over and over that it wasn't my fault,

but it was. I was still that little boy who had made himself forget that he was standing on the riverbank clutching onto the girl's arm as she was drowning. This, I realized, was why I had come here. I needed to make myself remember. I had to find the source of my fear. Remember what it was that kept this moment from my mind.

She drowned. In the river, she drowned. I hadn't remembered it. I made myself for me. forget. And that memory had seeped out into the movie, I realized, was my secret. I'd kept it locked up inside me, but the memory had found a way. My little sister's ghost wouldn't be forgotten. Each time I thought of that damnable movie, each time I tried to remember return to Oz, I remember Dorothy Gail drowning in the river. But it wasn't Dorothy. It had never been Dorisie. It had never

been Dorothy. It had been my little sister, and she was my ghost. Not some sinister, skulking figure that thirsted for revenge, but she had been there always in my shadows, haunting me until I made my own journey into the past, made my own return to Oz. That film was important to me. I'd never be free from it. Even when I tried to say goodbye, when I spoke my lost love. sister's name on that river bank I knew she would follow me forever. I couldn't lock her away again. Return to Oz, bound us together forever. Because my mother, who had loved Judy Garland,

had named my sister, Dorothy. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast, or to suggest stories for, For future episodes, please visit us at Creepypod on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or email us. All stories told on this podcast can be found at creepypasta wiki.com. And are protected by a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved unless otherwise stated.